


Imagine Your OTP

by ScatteredWords



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Meta, an AU about AUs, basically all the AUs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2018-12-18 16:40:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11878578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScatteredWords/pseuds/ScatteredWords
Summary: Laura Hollis doesn't know why she started only meeting girls in fanfic-worthy ways. But she does know that the author of her life is particularly sadistic.





	1. The Moving AU

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, my other fics will still be updating. Probably. At some point.  
> This fic is based on several true stories. My friends can attest to that, and show the all-caps text conversations to prove it.

The first time, it might have been a coincidence.

Laura knelt on the sidewalk, drenched in sweat. This had been such a good idea at the beginning. An amazing idea. The idea of a proper adult who had her life together. Except, as it turned out, 2 miles was a long way to walk; longer weighed down with groceries. 82 degrees was far hotter than she’d realized when she merrily set out three hours ago. And speaking of groceries…she glanced at the brightly-colored canvas bags that surrounded her.

“Damn those roomy Stop ‘N’ Shop carts,” she grumbled. “You all seemed about ten pounds lighter in the store.”

The groceries remained rudely silent.

With a sigh, she looked behind her, trying to gauge how much longer her respite could last. _If that kid steals his sister’s teddy bear again, that should hold them up for another 30 seconds, and-_

Her train of thought came to a screeching halt when a voice from somewhere above said, “Hey. Um. Do you need some help?”

Not just any voice, her brain registered. A female voice. A young female voice, no less. Laura raised her head- and beheld a vision from heaven.

Above her loomed a goddess, with a halo of dark curls tinged gold around the edges by the setting sun. Her brown eyes were warm as velvet, and full of so much sympathy that Laura felt her muscles release tension she hadn’t even known she was holding. Best of all, her tank top revealed the most toned arms Laura had ever seen. Perfect for carrying groceries.

 _Or carrying me_ , she thought, heat rising to her cheeks. But all she said, once she managed to make her tongue and brain work in concert again, was “Yes. I mean, yes please. It’s…they’re heavy.”

The stranger immediately grabbed three of the five bags, hefting them with ease. “Girl, what have you got in here? The entire store?”

“I just moved,” Laura replied. She lifted the two remaining bags and gestured in the direction of her apartment. “There’s no food in the house. I mean, the apartment. Well, it’s in a house, but it’s not my…house…” The sentence trailed off and she mentally kicked herself.

Fortunately, the girl didn’t seem to notice (or mind). “I didn’t even know that place in Davis could hold this much stuff. Especially this much cookie dough ice cream,” she said teasingly.

The playful tone made Laura’s stomach do a little flip. “I, uh, didn’t go to the place in Davis. I went to Stop ‘N’ Shop,” she stammered.

In front of her, the helpful girl screeched to a halt. She looked over her shoulder at Laura with an incredulous expression. 

“You planned to walk two miles home with a full load of groceries? Are you insane or just a masochist?”

“Neither!” Laura protested. “I didn’t know there was a place in Davis! It didn’t show up on Google Maps, so I figured Stop ‘N’ Shop was the only option!”

The girl laughed. “Hey, it’s your choice. If you want to start a crossfit routine during your grocery walk, be my guest. But that’s like going all the way to Hogsmeade when what you needed was in Diagon Alley the whole time.”

“How did you know-” A cool breeze unstuck Laura’s shirt from her back for a blissful instant, and she remembered the massive black-and-yellow badger shield emblazoned across her chest. Oh. Right. 

“But what if you’re really jonesing for Honeyduke’s?”

The topic of Harry Potter carried them down the hill, past two blocks of houses, and all the way to Laura’s front door. She couldn’t believe this was happening; it was too perfect. Too much like…well, a story. She found herself wondering if she and this girl fought dragons together in another universe, or solved crime with a secret AI supercomputer, or maybe if she was a girl from a space station and the girl- Gwen, she’d learned during their walk –was the leader of a post-apocalyptic forest society. She mentally winced and scratched out the last one. _Don’t want to wish death on someone I just met. A very very cute girl I just met, no less._

But there was definitely something unreal about their meeting. Gwen smiled at Laura as she leaned back against the weathered porch railing, and Laura thought, _It’s perfect._  
Dimly, she became aware that the conversation had meandered into a lull. Should she test the waters? Fortune- and lady kisses –favored the bold, after all.

“Hey,” she said, “would you like my number? I mean, I’m new in the neighborhood. It might be kind of nice to have a local guide.”

Gwen smiled. “Yeah, sure! I’d be happy to help you navigate the treacherous waters of South Medford.” She dug her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, and held it out to Laura. As she entered her number in a new contact window, Laura heard Gwen say, “And it’s really cool that your parents trust you to go all the way to Stop ‘N’ Shop and back, but next time, I’d make them help out if they want the entire grocery supply of the world so badly.”

Something began worming its way into the back of her mind. “My…parents?”

“Well, yeah.” Gwen shrugged. “I mean, I’m guessing you don’t live on your own in high school.”

 _Oh no. No, no, no, no._ “Gwen?” Laura asked, trying to keep her tone light. “How old are you? Just curious.”

“Sixteen,” Gwen said as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “Why? How old are you?”

Laura inwardly cursed the works of every fanfic author in existence. “Twenty-three.”

\------------------------------------

“And then she said good-bye and I said good-bye and she left. So that was pretty much the most awkward thing I’ve ever done.”

“Oh Laura. Honey, I’m sorry.” Perry reached across the flimsy cubicle divider to pat Laura’s hand. “Better luck next- will you stop laughing?” The last part was directed not at Laura, but at the receptionist whose desk stood across the narrow hallway from the cubes.

The receptionist who was now bent double across their desk, shaking with silent laughter.

“I’m- I’m sorry, frosh,” they gasped. “It’s just…it really did sound like some cheesy fanfic up ‘till then.”

“It really did feel like some cheesy fanfic up ‘till then!” Laura flung the highlighter she’d been fiddling with onto her desk.

“And you’re serious? She really was sixteen?” LaFontaine asked, eyes still tearing up with mirth.

Laura shook her head. “Serious as a heartbeat. And she thought I was her age! What about me says ‘high schooler’?”

LaF and Perry glanced at each other. Then Perry sucked in her breath slowly, glancing around her cubicle as if searching for a way to answer. She looked increasingly uncomfortable as potted begonias, a ceramic cat, and a framed photo of her and a certain receptionist on what looked like a speedboat failed to come to her aid.

LaF, on the other hand, was more direct. “Frosh,” they began- only to be cut off by Laura.

“Why do you call me that? Every time I ask you just chuckle and go back to ordering sulfuric acid on eBay.”

“First of all, I am scandalized at the implication that I shop online on company time,” they replied with a crooked smile that belied all claims of offense. “Secondly, I call you frosh for the same reason your own personal Person B thought you were in high school: you’re tiny and sugar-obsessed and almost disturbingly eager. Like a freshman.”

Laura groaned. “Please tell me you at least mean a freshman in college.”

“If you want to believe that, I won’t crush your dreams.” But a few giggles broke through LaF’s attempt at seriousness.

“Okay,” Laura said, pulling her blazer off the back of her chair and slipping her arms through the sleeves. “Operation Real Adult starts now. Good-bye, frosh; hello respectable college graduate with her life in order.”

“I’d pay to see that.”

Laura froze mid-cuff straightening. An irritated sigh escaped her lips.

“You know, most coffee shops don’t have a delivery service. I’m just saying,” she ground out.

A silky chuckle came from behind her desk. “What’s wrong, cupcake? Don’t like all the amenities of working for a Fortune 500 with a Starbucks on the ground floor?”

Before she even swiveled her company-issue plastic chair, Laura knew what she’d see. Five feet, four inches of pure bad attitude, wrapped in a green apron with a white mermaid logo. Plus three inches of combat boot heels and what looked like a full bottle of liquid eyeliner.

She turned around anyway. “Good morning, Carmilla,” she said in an aggressively polite tone.

“Morning, cutie,” said the dark-haired woman now leaning against one wall of her cubicle. She jerked her head towards a cardboard tray with four steaming coffee cups. “Caramel mocha with extra whipped cream? It’s got everything a growing teen needs.”

“A growing-” Laura glanced over Carmilla’s shoulder at LaF, who was once again struggling to hold back laughter. “LaF! Please tell me you didn’t text her again.”

“Sorry, Laur,” LaF shrugged. “This was just too good not to share.”

“Why you two have to be friends is beyond me,” Laura grumbled. Stalking over to Carmilla, she snatched her coffee cup from the tray and glared at barista. Who didn’t even have the grace to look guilty. _That smug, sleazy...jerkface._

“What,” Carmilla said, “not worried about being late for first period? Pretty ballsy of you, I must admit.”

“Oh, put a sock in it,” Laura snarled. She stomped back over to her desk and set her coffee down hard. Too hard. Brown liquid sloshed over the rim of the cup, past the towering island of whipped cream, and soaked a stack of papers marked with red page flags. “Shit!”

“And with that magnificent display of grace, I take my leave.” Carmilla unstuck herself from the side of the cubicle and strolled away with the rest of the coffees as Perry raced for the tiny kitchen across the hall.


	2. The Perfect Stranger AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll try to power through regular updates, but don't get used to it just in case.

The second time might have been the happy ending.

“So why are we buying lab supplies in the art store?”

“Turpentine is cheaper here,” LaF explained without looking up from the metal jugs on the bottom shelf. “Plus I can use Perry’s discount card.” They held up a key ring with a rainbow plastic card among the brass-toned keys. Laura glanced skeptically at the squishy, pastel cookie keychain.

“Did you swipe that from her desk?” she asked. They shrugged.

“It’s the monthly deep-clean of our place. Between sweeping the basement and baking éclairs, she won’t be going out any time soon. I do it all the time."

Laura frowned. “Why is baking involved? Won’t that just generate more mess?”

“Perr likes the place to smell like sugar,” LaF replied, smiling fondly. “She says it doesn’t feel like home otherwise. Hey, which of these looks bigger to you?”  
As they knelt and examined two seemingly identical bottles (with identical six-inch-long warning labels), Laura stabilized herself with one hand on the battered tan shelf and turned to her friend.

“How did you meet Perry, anyway? I’d never have pegged you two for a couple if you weren’t already together when I moved here.”

LaF shrugged, straightening up with the winning turpentine jug in one hand and a paint stirrer in the other. “She went absolute berserker rage on some boys who made fun of my dinosaur toys the first day of kindergarten. After that it was just kind of…a thing. She’s been in my life ever since, and when we grew up- well. That thing evolved into another thing. Okay, I’m all set.”

“How did you know?”

“Well, I simply divided the price by the volume, and this brand is pretty universally available, so-” they paused, noticing Laura’s raised eyebrows. “Oh, you mean with Perry? I just knew. If it was going to be anybody, it was going to be her.”

Laura remained silent as they passed through aisles of gold leaf, airbrush paints, binding needles, and stretched canvas. Even almost bumping into a gaggle of college students, all Emerson sweatshirts and neon-colored hair, couldn’t rouse her from her thoughts. It wasn’t until they stepped outside that the tinkling bells tied to the door handle finally brought her back to reality.

Well, that and the words “hot chocolate.”

“…grab some at that place down the block. I hear they brought out their peppermint flavor early. Sound good?”

“Hm?” She blinked, automatically zipping her jacket against the October chill. “Oh. Um, yeah. That sounds fine.”

LaF rolled their eyes. “Okay, who was it this time?”

“What?”

“Is there some mystery girl again?” LaF set off down the block, forcing Laura to jog a few steps to catch up. They shot her a broad grin. “Is she legal this time?”

Laura groaned. “So help me, LaFontaine, if you don’t stop bringing that up every five seconds, I will- I will…” she trailed off. No threat could possibly be dire enough for teasing of this magnitude. Not even telling Perry they’d been stealing compressed air canisters from the supply closet again.

“Sic Carmilla on me?” they supplied with a laugh. Laura punched the button on the walk sign and waited as cars continued racing past. She sighed a white puff into the air.

“No, because I don’t hate you that much. Or anyone. Well, maybe my landlord.” Her eyes lit up with mock glee. “Can I sic Carmilla on my landlord?”

A white stick figure appeared on the sign across the street and the one nearest them began emitting loud beeps. As they started across, LaF replied, “Laur, I don’t think you hate even Carmilla that much.”

“True. I just…whoa.” Laura’s mouth dropped open.

Across the street, arm in arm with a girl whose combat boots rivaled Carmilla’s, was a vision so beautiful Laura almost forgot to breathe. Her hair gleamed a bright copper in the setting sun; the same light turned her blue-green eyes golden. She tilted her head to one side, catching Laura’s eye for a brief instant. She smiled and Laura forgot how to move, forgot where she was going, forgot almost everything but that sunburnt face.

Until a honking sound made her jump about a foot.

“Come on, you useless lesbian!” LaF tugged on her arm, towing her away from the car whose owner was making a rude gesture behind the windshield. “God, if you go this catatonic every time you see an attractive girl, it’s amazing you’re still alive.”

“I should never have showed you that meme,” Laura retorted as they entered the dimly-lit café, but there was no real bite to her words. Her eyes were still faintly glazed over; she seemed to stare around her without really taking in the cheap tables or trendy glass light fixtures. It wasn’t until she was seated with a steaming paper cup pressed into her hand that she shook her head slightly and seemed to return to reality.

“Um…how did we get here?”

LaF sighed and took a swig of coffee. “And welcome back to the land of the living, frosh. Honestly I’m amazed you didn’t run after her all Heathcliff-style. You looked like you’d just heard harps and seen those weird chubby Cupids from Renaissance paintings floating around.”

“Putti,” Laura supplied automatically.

“Right. I knew they had a dirty-sounding name.”

“Anyway, it would have been pointless. She’s probably straight or we have nothing in common or…or she’s secretly in high school.” With a sigh, Laura plopped her head down on her folded arms. She glanced up at LaF. “Any time you want to tell me I can’t know that, I’m all ears.”

“Hm? Oh no, statistically you’re probably right.” LaF reached across the table to ruffle Laura’s hair. “Sorry, Hollis. You win some, you lose some.”

She drifted in and out of a fog of self-pity as they began a lengthy tirade about Perry’s latest crime against scientific inquiry (throwing out a petri dish full of samples when they began growing a distressingly mobile, furry mold). Her shoulders remained slumped and her eyes downcast as they both shrugged on their jackets, dropped their cups into the hole on the recycling bin marked “paper,” and ventured out into the chill air once more. Sunlight through the leaves lifted her spirits somewhat; the fiery branches of a New England autumn, that brought tourists from miles around, never failed to work their magic on Laura. By the time the pair turned down a side street and started towards a shingle painted with “Pandemonium” in large white letters, she found herself back in their usual teasing rapport.

A computerized chime sounded as they stepped into the store. The cashier, a man with a scruffy beard and several ear piercings, looked up from a photo album full of Pokémon cards.

“LaFontaine! Hey!” he said. “We got those new figures in downstairs. I was going to text you, but-”

Laura wandered off in the direction of several tall bookshelves, smiling absently. There wasn’t a single tabletop gamer in the greater Boston area who didn’t know LaF- though they’d received a lifetime ban from running games after something they called The Apricot Incident. She let the babble of conversation (punctuated by occasional swearing and the clatter of dice from the plastic card table in the back of the store) wash over her as she examined the new arrivals. A flash of copper caught her eye from the next aisle and she peered around the shelf to see...

_Oh, crap._

The girl.

The girl with the perfect red hair and the perfect warm smile.

The girl who was much taller up close, tall enough that Laura’s head only came up to her chest. And who happened to be holding a book that had been collecting dust on the great Hollis To-Read List for months.

Heart pounding, Laura swallowed hard and took a step forward, putting herself squarely in the girl’s field of vision.

“Hi! I’m Laura. Is that any good?”

In a universe with a sense of justice, it might have been the happy ending.

\----------------------------

“So wait. Explain to me again why you absolutely cannot date her?"


	3. The Coffee Shop Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I must be public enemy #1 at the Department of Consistent Updates. Sincerest apologies, but I doubt things will get any better on that score.

“So explain to me again why you can’t date her?”

Laura groaned, slumping in the exciting ergonomic chair and tilting her head back to stare at the ceiling. “You’ve got me,” she replied. “By all accounts it makes no sense.” Tragically, the black-painted particleboard and recessed lighting failed to reveal the secrets of the universe. She may have always suspected that one could attain enlightenment in a Starbucks, but it wouldn’t be today. With another dramatic sigh, she went back to staring at the steam curling up from her cider.

“Well,” said LaF with a raised eyebrow, “quoting The Emperor’s New Groove isn’t going to help anything.” They licked whipped cream off their index finger and stared into space for a moment. “Maybe you just don’t know her well enough yet?”

“It’s not that. It’s just…” Laura trailed off, shaking her head. “She’s just not right. There’s no-” she gestured vaguely “-click. I like being around her, but I’ve never wanted to kiss her or anything.”

LaF’s phone beeped; they picked it up and swiped their thumb across the screen. A sly smile grew on their face. “Ask the cupcake if she’s pouting about that ginger Amazon you sent the picture of,” they read aloud. 

Laura flushed. “What?!” She quickly glanced around the half-full coffee shop. Her eyes finally settled on the counter some distance away, behind which a dark-haired girl in band t-shirt stood glued to her phone. She looked up and gave a jaunty wave when she spotted Laura. Who, in turn, had to restrain herself from flashing a rude hand gesture her way.

“You told her?” she hissed at LaF.

“You know, Frosh, she’s not that bad.” They looked down at their page of calculations and carefully scribbled another incomprehensible string of letters and numbers. Laura gripped her paper cup more tightly.

“Not that bad? She oozed her way into this friend group like some kind of…some kind of…”

The phone gave another digital chirp. “Oil spill?” LaF read from the screen.

Laura clenched her teeth. “Give me your phone.” Without waiting for a response, she swiped the phone in its bright green case out of LaF’s hand and began typing. As a swish indicated that her message had sent, she slammed the phone down with a triumphant expression.

“Let’s see what she has to say about that.” She took a swig of her cider- and promptly burst into hacking coughs, frantically fanning her mouth.

“Ih’s haa!” she managed between more coughs and ragged breaths. The hand not holding the cup gripped the table for support.

“Well, yeah, it’s hot cider,” LaF said. They stood and quickly began patting their friend hard on the back. “Are you okay? Do you need some water?”

“What’s going on?” The voice was familiar. Too familiar. Laura couldn’t help rolling her eyes even as they streamed with tears and she tried to suck air over her scalded tongue. Of course the vulture would come to take advantage of her misfortune.

Sure enough, when she looked up, there was Carmilla in all her disheveled, too-much-eyeliner glory. There was a weird hint of something unfamiliar in her expression that might have been concern, an idea so foreign to everything Carmilla that Laura pushed it out of her mind. She held out a cup of water, which Laura gratefully took and began chugging.

“That was…surprisingly helpful,” she gasped when her tongue finally regained feeling.

“Yeah, well,” Carmilla replied with a half-smile, “if you die here our insurance premiums will go through the roof.”

Laura coughed a few more times and rolled her eyes. “Of course. Because it would actually kill you to care about another person for five minutes. She looked down at herself and groaned at the warm, pale brown liquid dripping from her sweater. Its delightfully spicy smell was both autumnal and taunting; a quick stab at her phone’s on button and a glance at the screen told her it was 12:45.

“And naturally my lunch break ends in fifteen minutes, so it’s not like I have…time to…go…”

She trailed off as her eyes wandered from the glowing screen to the black cardigan that had been shoved under her nose. Carmilla held it out to her with an expectant look.

“Well?” she said after a long, awkward moment of Laura staring at the soft, dark fabric as if it might bite her. “I noticed yours was wrecked before I came over and this lives under the counter for when the manager decides it’s gotten too far above freezing.”

Laura blinked at it again.

“Go on.” Carmilla unceremoniously dumped the cardigan in her lap. “Just bring it back tomorrow.”

Cautiously, Laura slipped it over her shoulders. The wool was smoother than she’d expected, clearly high-quality, and it carried a strange musky scent. Like incense, maybe, and something else she couldn’t quite name.

“Thanks.” Her brow furrowed as she looked up at Carmilla. Who, for her part, just shrugged.

“No problem. Can’t have the office overachiever looking less-than-professional, can we?” And with that, she wandered back behind the counter and began doodling on a cardboard sleeve as if the whole affair had never happened.

Laura became dimly aware that LaF was staring at her. “What?”

They shook their head. “Nothing. That was just…” they paused, seemingly searching for the right word. But they didn’t get a chance to find it, because Laura found her voice again.

“Uncharacteristically nice? The first sign we’ve ever seen that Carmilla has emotions besides ‘blasé’ and ‘casual sadism’?” she supplied with a snort. She further crumpled one of the already balled-up napkins that littered the table and swiped at her sweater ineffectually. “Anyway, that’s the Danny situation. Extremely long version. Satisfied?”

“Um, yeah, Frosh,” LaF replied with raised eyebrows. They watched, bemused, as Laura began slamming notebooks and folders into her sensible leather bag as if they’d personally offended her. Her curtain of light brown hair flipped onto the table as she frantically looked around. After feeling around on the plastic surface for a few seconds, unable to believe her eyes, she felt a tap on her shoulder and straightened up.

LaF held out her phone. If Laura hadn’t known better, she’d swear they were trying to hold back laughter.

“I’m satisfied, but it seems you could stand to shake down the table a bit more.”

Their quiet chuckles followed Laura out the door as she stormed into the building’s main lobby and slammed the gold-toned elevator button with her fist. Not for the first time, she wondered if the inventor of the elevator had known how much people sometimes just needed to punch something.


	4. The Random Work Coincidence AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not really much to be said about this one, except that it's an orgy of evidence that this story is set in Boston (to paraphrase CinemaSins).

After a few more dates- no, not dates, they never quite got to that stage of things despite Laura’s nagging suspicion that Danny would like to –what Laura had first suspected proved only too true.

She was hopelessly, madly, utterly not in love with Danny Lawrence.

Hopelessly and madly because, as her neighbor Betty had said over steaming mugs of cocoa on her porch, “You’d have to be crazy to pass that up, Hollis.”

But crazy she must have been, because that spark she dreamed about failed to ignite in her chest. No matter the activity, no matter the time or place. They’d even watched the Tufts end-of-midterms fireworks from the bridge over the train tracks, a spot Laura had marked as rom com kiss material from the first time she’d seen it. Stars shone brightly overhead, along with a full moon, and glittering silver sparks had rained from the sky like waterfalls of diamond dust against black velvet. The autumn breeze had whipped Danny’s hair about her face; she’d raised her hand and nonchalantly raked it back in a movement that highlighted her long, graceful neck. They’d leaned against the guard rail and talked about nothing for an hour, finally lapsing into comfortable silence near the finale of the show.

And then Laura had hugged Danny good-bye, made her promise to text when she got home, and sent her off to the bus stop. And that was it.

At every coffee shop meetup after that, every afternoon spent traipsing around the Museum of Fine Arts, there had been a bit less pressure. Or a bit less potential. Danny began to talk about girls she met in her grad program and Laura felt only the slightest disappointment, directed more at herself than at Lupe the young European lit professor or Sarah Jane the tragically straight bartender. Which was, in itself, pretty disappointing.

But as the season marched on, so did life.

“Miss Hollis?” 

“Hm?” Laura jolted upright, trying to look as though she hadn’t just been dozing at her desk. She tried to reach up nonchalantly and feel for spiral notebook indentations on her cheek.

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me a second ago, but you get to do some fieldwork. Won’t that be delightful?” A tall woman with dark skin, blood-red lipstick, and a white dress so elegantly minimalistic that it had to be designer stood over her, arms folded. She raised an eyebrow. “Unless your sleep schedule had other things in mind.”

“Um. No! No, of course not- I just- one second, Miss Belmonde,” Laura said frantically. “Fieldwork sounds amazing.” In a blind panic, she flung a canvas tote from beneath her desk onto the stiff swivel chair and began sweeping everything her hands touched into the bag. Pens, pencils, three notebooks of varying sizes, a sushi-shaped eraser, a can of Bad Wolf soda, and what appeared to be a small and totally useless model of the Hufflepuff crest all wound up in the too-orange bag she dimly recalled being a Halloween giveaway from Stop ‘N’ Shop as she raced to pack up under her supervisor’s faintly amused gaze.

“I’m assuming you want to know what the assignment is?”

Laura paused with one arm stuffed into her coat sleeve and hair that had slithered out from behind her ear covering half of her face. “Oh. Yes, definitely.” 

“Some Red Sox player is retiring,” Miss Belmonde explained, examining her perfect nails. “They’re signing a card for him down at Quincy Market; it’s giant or made entirely of pictures of Boston terriers or something. Possibly both. Regardless, Mrs. Morgan wants us to run a piece on it, and that means we’re going to need quotes. The camera crew has already headed out. You have ten minutes to meet them there.”

“Ten minutes?” Laura squeaked.

“Yes. I suggest you run, cherie.”

And run she did. Without even bothering to put her coat on completely, Laura shouldered her bag and sprinted for the elevator. Once facing the fancy brass doors, she pressed the down button.

Nothing happened.

She pressed it again. And again. And again, stabbing her finger against the yielding plastic half a dozen times in quick succession. All to no avail.

“Come on; come on!” Laura growled under her breath. Just as panic really started to set in, the lift hummed to life. She watched the platform smoothly ascend through the glass panel on the front of the elevator shaft.

The minute the doors closed, she slumped against the wall. “Why no-one has fixed this damn thing yet, I’ll never know,” she muttered to herself. “Okay, Hollis. Time to talk up a giant card. Or a card made of Boston terriers.”

\------------------------------

The card, as it turned out, was neither giant nor made of Boston terriers. The card, as it turned out, did not exist.

What did exist was a massive red 34 that appeared to be made out of hollow cardboard, propped up in one corner of Quincy Market. According to the manager on duty, a pleasant if rather strained-looking woman named Cassie, that was the number of the venerable baseball player in question. A small mountain of colored Sharpies sat on the nearby info desk, just waiting for eager fans to add their well-wishes to the display.

And a small, angry-looking girl sat on a stool at the stall directly across from the giant numbers, glaring at them as if she was trying to set them on fire with her mind. 

Laura could hardly blame her, she thought as she fought her way through the crowd towards a stall selling stained-glass butterflies. The Market, busy on a normal day, was now standing room only. Tourists sporting Sox jerseys pushed ruthlessly against the current of ordinary shoppers, determined to leave their mark on the cardboard tribute. Add in the sunlight streaming through the glass ceiling and the unseasonable warmth of the day, and the result was a sweaty mess of shoving people all trying to reach the same six or so feet of floor space.

Six or so feet of floor space that happened to be right in front of the girl’s t-shirt display. 

Laura winced sympathetically in her direction, but continued to the glass stall. It wasn’t until about an hour later that the tide of people swept her towards the camera crew that was now filming a moving speech from the Market CEO.

“…and we celebrate his legacy,” the tall man said into a microphone. “The city of Boston is forever indebted to this great man, who we now wish the best in the next phase of his life.”

“It’s bullshit.”

Laura whipped around, trying to find the source of the quiet comment. At last, her eyes settled on the t-shirt girl, who raised her hand and gave a little wave. She pointed to her chest, confused, and received a nod in response. Slowly, she wandered over to the half-hidden stall (having to apologize to at least one knot of tourists in the process).  
“Beg pardon?” she said when she finally reached her destination.

“I said, it’s bullshit,” the girl replied evenly. She pushed her chestnut-brown bangs out of her eyes. “Half the people here don’t even know who this guy is. I certainly don’t.”  
Laura shrugged. “Neither do I, but I guess he made people really happy.”

“Sorry, that probably came off as rather callous,” the girl said. “I’m just not much of a sports girl.”

“Me neither.” A faint smile crept onto Laura’s face. “Just here because my boss sent me. But, you know, good to get out of the office.”

“Mmm.” It was a sound that could have been agreement or disagreement, but the girl was smiling in response. Now that Laura looked at her, she wasn’t entirely unattractive. Nothing to write home about, but her eyes were an unusual shade of gray-blue. They were both stuck at this stupid press stunt for work, they wouldn’t have met if not for a sudden change in both of their routines, they were both around the right age…and just like that, her patented Hollis Fanfic Sense began to tingle.

“So,” Laura continued with as much nonchalance as she could muster, “if sports aren’t your thing, what is?”

“Antique doll restoration,” the girl replied.

“That’s…” Laura struggled to come up with the right word, her hopes flagging a little. “…interesting?”

The girl laughed. “You too, huh? Yeah, my girlfriend is always telling me I have to stop leading with that.”

The hopes that had previously been flagging were slowly lowered and removed from the pole altogether, Laura’s mental brass band playing Taps all the while.

After a thoroughly uneventful afternoon, she found herself trudging back through the office doors with nothing but a notebook full of platitudes from various vendors about how good the event was for business, and the Tumblr URL of one very taken, very creepy doll enthusiast. She was so busy grumbling under her breath that she didn’t notice her steps carrying her away from the elevators until the sounds of electric guitar and crooning reached her ears.

She blinked. Somehow, the glass and chrome lobby had transformed into a dimly lit space with battered wood paneling and the smell of roasting coffee in the air. And a curiously incongruous song about spies playing over the PA system.

“Charming Disaster?” she said half-to herself.

As if in response, the song cut off in the middle of a line about cracking a safe and a violent metal riff took its place. She glanced at the front of the store to see Carmilla shoving what looked like an iPod back under the counter.

“Can I help you?” the barista deadpanned.

Laura took a few steps towards her. “You like Charming Disaster?” she asked. Carmilla snorted.

“Do I look like the type of girl who listens to weird folk crap, sweetheart?” Her nails beat an irregular rhythm on the marble countertop as she slowly took in Laura’s disheveled state and dark expression. “Side note, who killed your puppy?”

“Oh my god.” Laura rolled her eyes. “Listen, I have nothing to discuss with you.” She turned on her heel and stalked towards the door.

“Girl trouble?” The languid inquiry from behind her stopped her in her tracks.

“It wouldn’t be your business if it was,” she replied without turning around.

“Too bad,” Carmilla said a bit too casually, “because if it was, I might be persuaded to slip you some madeleines. Regular, not chocolate-dipped; I’m not Bill Gates.”  
Laura half-turned. “Really?”

“No.”

Clenching her jaw, she snapped, “Exactly how did you get this damaged?”

“Many have speculated. Who’s Doll Girl?”

Laura spun back to face the counter. “How the hell did you-"

Carmilla held up one hand. Stuck to her palm was a yellow sticky note. A yellow sticky note bearing the URL “jumeawesome13.tumblr.com” under the nickname “DOLL GIRL.”

“Fell out of your notebook,” came the lazy response. “What happened with this one? Same as Subway Straight Girl? Or was she more like Overly Hyperactive Bar Girl?”

In two tense steps, Laura closed the distance between them and swiped the note from Carmilla’s hand. “Again, none of your business. And you’d better stop getting LaF to tell you about my personal life.”

“I never ask, Cupcake,” Carmilla said with a smirk. “They volunteer.”

With that, she picked up her iPod again and began scrolling from one hard rock song to the next. Laura, still fuming, stomped to the door, flung it open, and left. (Regretting, not for the first time, that Starbucks doors could not be slammed. There’s nothing emotionally cathartic about a gentle hiss of compressed air.)

Nothing about the weekend improved her mood in the slightest. Which may be why, on Monday morning, she failed to notice the packet of spongy, golden madeleines- plain, not chocolate-dipped –added to the total chaos of her desk.


	5. The Same Taste In Gifts AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You do not know frustration until you've finished a chapter before work but had to dash to catch your bus and thus couldn't post it for roughly seven hours.

_Dark Arts Holiday Market,_ the flier read in jagged purple letters on a black background. _5:30-8:00 PM @ Tarantula Tattoos._ What appeared to be a cartoon version of Baphomet, horns strung with twinkle lights, perched on the name of the shop and announced free drink vouchers for the first 25 customers. Laura took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nose, counting to ten.

“LaFontaine is your friend,” she muttered to herself, her breath coming out in white puffs. “Friends go out and do things with other friends. Even if those things are at tattoo parlors named for venomous bugs.”

She adjusted her scarf, winding the black-and-gold striped wool tighter around her neck as the breeze rose around her and threatened to turn into full-blown freezing wind. November hadn’t shown any mercy this year; it seemed to be in a nosedive headed straight for a typical New England winter, and the crowds hurrying around Kendall Square with their collars turned up and their eyes firmly fixed ahead knew it all too well. Laura cast a glance at the slate-gray sky. Snow she might have been excited about, but it had been just warm enough lately that any precipitation was bound to be icy rain. So preoccupied was she with the weather that she forgot to move out of the mouth of the subway stairs.  
Until, that is, someone nearly knocked her down from behind.

“Oh, geez, I’m so-” she began.

“Could you maybe not-” the stranger snarled. Only it wasn’t a stranger at all.

“You.”

“You,” Carmilla replied mildly. She pulled one earbud out- Laura heard the sounds of guitar turned up entirely too loud to be good for one’s hearing –and shoved her hand back in the pocket of her black peacoat. “Do you always stop dead at the entrance to a busy station, or am I just lucky?”

“I- that’s-” Laura fumbled for words as she scooted out of the way of an irritated-looking businessman. 

Carmilla raised an eyebrow. “Don’t push yourself, cupcake. You might sprain something.”

“I was checking the weather,” Laura finally said. She crossed her arms. “I don’t suppose you have a good excuse for not looking where you were going?”

“Work stuff.” Carmilla raised her phone (whose case, Laura absently noticed, appeared to be a metallic gold outline of the Prague astronomical clock).

“Starbucks requires extra work?” Laura said in a deadpan tone that almost rivaled Carmilla’s. A wry smile crept over the other girl’s face.

“Contrary to popular belief, you don’t know everything about my life.” Without further comment, she turned and started walking. Laura glanced down at the directions on her own phone’s screen and sighed. She then set off- in exactly the same direction Carmilla had.

It was the work of a few moments for Laura to catch up to the retreating black wool coat in front of her, despite her shorter legs. And at that point, it seemed more awkward to just keep walking in silence.

“So,” she ventured, “you have another job?”

At first, Carmilla said nothing. Laura waved her hand close to her face, which seemed to catch her eye. She turned slightly towards Laura, but didn’t stop walking.  
“Can I help you?” she asked dryly. She pulled out her other earbud but didn’t let it drop as she had the first.

“I said, do you have another job?” Laura repeated with as much courtesy as she could force into the words. 

Her rather strained politeness did not go unnoticed. “It’s okay, frosh. You don’t have to pretend to be nice to the big scary barista.” Carmilla’s earbud was shoved emphatically back into place.

“Of all the things to pick up from LaF, it had to be that one,” Laura growled. There was no response, and the rest of the walk continued without conversation.

The walk, singular. Because to Laura’s rising anxiety, Carmilla never split off from their shared path. They passed record shops with blue lights in the window, cafes with names Laura couldn’t have pronounced if she tried, and any number of tiny boutique thrift stores with gauzy black dresses proudly displayed for post-Halloween sales. And yet, Carmilla passed by every likely candidate for her destination. Over the next ten minutes, Laura learned a valuable life lesson: if saying good-bye to someone and then walking away in the same direction was bad, unintentionally making someone angry and doing the same was worse. Much, much worse.

At last, angels sang in her mind as they reached a building proudly displaying bat-shaped string lights, an elaborate window painting of a black spider in a Santa hat, and a shingle that read “TARANTULA” in the same lettering as the aforementioned flyer.

“Well, see you around,” she said hurriedly, and reached for the scratched-up door handle. Only to have her hand touch not battered bronze but another hand, warm in a deep burgundy fingerless glove.

Carmilla blinked at her. “You’re going to the holiday market?” she asked, without a hint of sarcasm for perhaps the first time in Laura’s memory.

“Um. Yes?” Laura scoffed. “What, am I not hardcore enough for it or something?”

“First of all, that makes no sense. Secondly, I wouldn’t have pegged it as your scene, sweetheart.” Carmilla’s usual background levels of snark had returned. She pushed back the dark curls cascading from beneath her beanie. “But since you didn’t burst into flames immediately upon contact with any part of a tattoo shop like I would have expected, I guess it’s just a day of surprises all around.”

“Hey!” Laura began, but her protest was cut off as Carmilla, hand still beneath hers, pushed the door open. She stumbled forward a few steps, and when she finally regained her balance, the door had swung shut behind Carmilla. Over the sound of jingling chimes, she grumbled to herself for a few moments before squaring her shoulders and marching inside.

If every goth, punk, rockabilly, and other alternative type in the greater Boston area had attended a symposium on how to create the platonic ideal of a tattoo parlor, the result would have been something very close to Tarantula. Brass-toned sconce lights with ruby glass shades threw a dim golden glow onto the deep purple walls of the small-ish room, threaded through with a garland of what appeared to be tinsel Krampuses. One curtained-off corner seemed to be buzzing intermittently, a sound Laura soon realized meant that at least one tattoo appointment hadn’t been postponed for the event. Folding tables lined the remaining space, manned by artisans in more shades of black than she’d previously imagined possible. In short, the kind of event LaFontaine would have loved- if they’d been there.

She scanned the room and found no ginger undercut in sight. Swearing under her breath, Laura pulled out her phone and dashed off a quick _where are you???_ to her absent friend. She shifted out of the doorway, remembering the unpleasant lesson of fifteen minutes before, and wandered over to a table of wine and cheese to await a reply.

A quick flash of her ID to a burly man sporting an impressive waxed mustache and even more impressive full sleeve tattoos got her a small plastic cup of red wine, which she sipped slowly as she watched the other customers mill around. It wasn’t bad, at least not in her limited wine experience. And the crowd seemed more diverse than she would have expected; her Hufflepuff scarf wasn’t the only piece of Harry Potter gear in the room by far. A vendor selling antique photographs caught her eye, and she began to relax a little. Maybe this would be fun after all.

“Well, hello there,” came a crisp, British-accented voice to her left.

Laura turned to find a strange woman standing by her elbow. “Strange” was definitely the word, but strange in a way that fit perfectly with her surroundings. Cat-eye liner ringed her eyes, and the front of her long, brown hair had been pulled up into two perfect victory rolls. When she leaned forward to pluck a piece of cheese from the tray on the table, the front of her black slip dress gaped open slightly to reveal an abstract, emerald-green Art Nouveau design tattooed on her chest. She straightened up and regarded Laura with an inscrutable expression.

“Uh, hi,” Laura replied.

“I suppose you don’t know me.” The newcomer popped the cube of cheddar into her mouth.

“No, sorry. Should I?”

She chewed slowly and swallowed. A too-friendly smile crept across her face. “You came in with Carmilla, didn’t you? My, my.” Her gaze traveled up and down Laura’s body intently. “Aren’t you a pretty one?”

Laura took a step back. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

“How rude of me,” the woman in black said with a throaty laugh. She held out a slender hand. “Elle Sheridan. Owner and manager of this dump. Pleased to meet you, Miss…?”

“Laura. Laura Hollis.” Laura awkwardly shook the proffered hand, noting that Elle seemed to have a remarkably firm grip for her ethereal appearance. “Your place is really nice, though. Hardly a dump.”

Elle snorted. “And you’re not much of a liar, Miss Hollis. Though I appreciate the effort.” She selected a cup of white wine and took a swig, tapping one black-painted nail against the plastic as she continued staring at Laura.

“So,” she said with an air of practiced nonchalance, “when did you and Carmilla start seeing each other?”

Laura choked on a sip of wine. Coughing and spluttering, she finally managed to get out, “We’re not together.”

“Really? That’s-”

“Elle!”

Carmilla, of all people, was storming across the room in their direction. If looks could kill, Elle would have been dust.

“Carmilla, dear,” Elle said with a smile when the enraged barista finally reached the cheese table. “We were just talking about you!”

“Leave her alone, Elle.” Carmilla’s tone was utterly flat, in stark contrast to the daggers in her eyes.

“I was simply asking when you two lovebirds got together. Is that a crime? I’m happy for you,” Elle replied. Laura got the feeling that a comic artist would have added acid dripping from her speech bubble, though the tone was almost overly sweet. Her fingers had gone white on her cup and she was staring at Carmilla like a cat who’d backed a particularly juicy mouse into a corner.

Carmilla- laughed. Actually laughed out loud. “Her? You think I’d date her?” She shook her head. “You really don’t know me at all, do you?”

Laura opened her mouth to say something, something like “what’s that supposed to mean?” but a hand firmly latched onto her arm and began towing her across the room. Her rescuer was a slight Asian woman wearing a vintage ball gown and a worried expression. When they reached a table piled high with copies of a hand-stapled booklet, she stopped and turned Laura loose.

“Sorry about that,” she said tightly. Laura noticed absently that she seemed to be British, too. “It’s best not to be in the middle when those two get into it. I’m Charlotte, by the way.”

“Laura,” Laura replied. She shot Charlotte a shaky smile. “Thanks. I was on the verge of gnawing my own leg off to get away. Not sure how that would have helped, but maybe someone would have at least called an ambulance.”

Charlotte sighed, straightening a stack of books. “Yes, they tend to have that effect on people. It was worse when they were together.” She immediately looked guilty. “Oh, shit. You didn’t hear that from me, alright?”

“What, that they dated?” Laura blinked. “Why would anyone care?”

“Nobody really does- except Elle. She’ll skin anyone who mentions it. Verbally, that is, although frankly I wouldn’t put the literal kind of skinning past her.”

A tall black girl in a waistcoat and dress pants, her long, thick curls pushed back with a peacock-feather headband, slid into the booth from the curtained-off back room and pressed a kiss to Charlotte’s cheek. “Babe, I’m going to murder whoever suggested we keep our stock in the back. There’s a guy in there getting a tattoo of an elephant on his- oh, hey.” Mercifully, she seemed to notice Laura before finishing her sentence.

“Hi,” Laura chirped, sounding a bit shrill even to her own ears. “Laura Hollis.”

“Melanippe Callis,” the new girl replied with a nod. “Everyone calls me Mel.”

“She knows Carmilla,” Charlotte said in a significant tone. “And Elle knows she knows Carmilla.”

Mel cringed. “Ooh. Tough luck, hon. Sorry about that.”

“I didn’t realize it was going to be an issue,” Laura said. “I’m just here waiting for a friend.” As if on cue, her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her bag and stared at the screen. 

_Perry needs help w/some grout cleaner. Can’t make it. Sorry. See you tomorrow!_

Her stomach sank. “A friend who is apparently not coming.” With a sigh, she turned to face Mel and Charlotte.

“So. What are you guys selling?”

Laura would like to think she was paying full attention to Charlotte’s enthusiastic description of the quarterly LGBT horror lit ‘zine she edited, and Mel’s more subdued but clearly still proud description of her illustrations. She wanted to give the carefully-assembled booklet with an expert sketch of a hipster zombie on the cover more than a cursory glance before she dropped it into her bag and moved on. From faded sepia carte-de-viste photos of ladies in elaborate bustle gowns to handcrafted soaps in muted pastel shades that smelled like different kinds of incense, each booth held something she wanted to hold her undivided attention.

But even as she reached for a vole skull with flakes of gold leaf across its bleached snout and tiny amethyst points in place of canine teeth and another girl’s hand brushed hers, she found herself watching Carmilla and Elle out of the corner of her eye. Even when the girl, a petite artist type with horn-rimmed glasses, a soft cap of blue hair, and a glowing smile, admitted that she and Laura shared a favorite TV show. Even as a spark of hope bloomed in her chest at the sight of a pink, purple, and blue pin on the girl’s bag- and died when she mentioned her fiancé. Laura couldn’t seem to get the previous conversation out of her mind, especially when Elle practically dragged Carmilla into a corner of the room and they argued for a solid half-hour. At least, they seemed to be arguing, if the rapid-fire inaudible comments and tight, sharp movements of Elle’s hands were any indication.  
It was hard to imagine Carmilla- unflappable, disaffected Carmilla –getting worked up for anyone or anything. And yet, here they were.

In the end, Carmilla shouldered her bag and left, cutting a path through the crowd with her eyes fixed on the ground and her head tilted so that her hair formed a curtain over her face. She wrenched open the door and stomped out, slamming it behind her. The din of conversation in the room faltered for a moment, then gradually crept back to full volume.  
Laura noticed Elle staring at the door, fists balled at her sides. Her eyes seemed to glitter oddly in the dim light. She blinked several times. Then, she turned sharply and stalked into the back room.

When Laura caught herself wondering if Carmilla had given Elle some kind of disease as she tried to sip from her long-since-empty wine cup, it seemed time to call it a night. After checking to make sure her gifts for Perry and Danny- lunar phase cookie cutters and a pine-scented bath bomb respectively –were safely wrapped in her bag, she chucked her cup in the recycling and headed for the door.

And there, sitting on a bench outside, staring up at the orange-tinted clouds in the night sky, was Carmilla.

A brief war ensued inside Laura’s mind, but it was her mouth that ultimately settled the debate by cutting across all conscious thought and saying, “You’re still here?” 

Carmilla glanced languidly her way and grimaced. “Figures. Of course it would be you.” 

“I just…” Laura bit her lip, but soldiered ahead. “Listen, are you okay? After, you know. All that?” She gestured vaguely at the door she’d just walked through.

Carmilla chuckled dryly. She stood up and stretched. “Listen, creampuff, I’m not interested in heart-to-hearts, and if I was, you’d be the last person I’d talk to.” 

Before she could stop and think, Laura heard herself say, “What happened with you and Elle?”

To her surprise, Carmilla actually stopped and half-turned back to her. In the sickly yellow light from the street lamp, her expression was unreadable.

“I destroyed her life,” she said at last. As she walked away, the first light snowflakes began to fall.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possibly the shortest chapter so far. I tried to make it longer, but for some reason adding more just made it feel inauthentic. So I ended it where the spirit moved me to end it, and hopefully the next one will top 2,000 words.

Being awakened by upstairs neighbors having sex was not an unusual experience for Laura. She doubted it could be, to anyone who’d ever lived in a college dorm.  
Being awakened by an amorous downstairs neighbor- now that was a new one on her.

Weeks and weeks of silence from downstairs, punctuated only by the occasional sound of a door opening or closing, or footsteps across the lower floor, and now this. Just when she’d been starting to think luck had blessed her on the neighbor front, her fortunes had reversed dramatically. 

For the dozenth time, she rolled over and pressed an oversized, TARDIS-shaped pillow over her exposed ear. The moans and indistinct murmuring were, for a single blessed moment, muffled. As the moment stretched out, she dared allow herself to hope. Hope turned to relief as a full minute passed devoid of wooden-sounding creaks or breathy shouts of “Oh, fuck!” She felt her eyelids begin to droop, her body begin to relax into the soft warmth of the flannel sheets. Her thoughts scattered to the winds as her eyes closed, and sleep began to descend. Her grip loosened on the pillow, but she heard nothing except the winter wind outside and-

“Oh my **_god_**!”

Murder was illegal. She knew it. Everyone knew it. Massachusetts state law was quite clear on that point.

But if it hadn’t been, the woman who had just let out the most ear-piercing shriek of ecstasy from the floor below would have been sleeping with fishes and tea crates at the bottom of Boston Harbor.

“That's it.”

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. At the thud of her feet hitting the floor- a bit louder than strictly necessary, but so satisfying –the noises from below briefly paused. A smug smile crossed her face as she flicked on her lamp. The bright glow illuminated dresser, chair, mirrored closet door…and pile of clean laundry waiting to be put away. Waiting for a week now, to be precise. And somewhere in the mass of tangled fabric lay her favorite hoodie.

Swearing under her breath, Laura wandered over to the mound of clothes doubled in the mirror it rested against. She did her best to ignore the soundtrack of very audible but indistinct speech floating up through the floorboards as she yanked the garment out by one black and yellow sleeve. By some strange acoustic trick, it sounded as if the speakers were in her living room. The superstitious might have suspected a particularly erotic haunting.

A ghost would have been easier, she mused. At least then an exorcism could get rid of the problem for good. A moment of digging in her purse, and her keys were first in her hand and then shoved deep in her pocket. LaF would have said she was being paranoid. LaF had probably never had to deal with the mental consequences of a day off spent satisfying morbid curiosity on r/LetsNotMeet.

She strode through the living room (it wasn’t stomping, not really, just walking forcefully), clattered down the stairs, and paused in the little antechamber at the bottom to yank on her boots. One finger brushed a white streak of road salt crusted on the brown suede and she cringed slightly. The delightful product of winter in Boston: a mud room that resembled Walter White’s trash can.

Without further ado, she wrenched the door open, stormed onto the porch, and slammed it behind her. It took two long stabs at the doorbell to the right of hers and a solid thirty seconds of actual knocking before she finally heard footsteps echoing down the hall beyond. They drew level with the door, then paused. The silence that followed felt like an hour.

Laura breathed out, a white puff hovering briefly in the air before dissipating. Her cheeks began to tingle slightly with the cold, and as her face cooled, her anger began to do the same.

Maybe this was stupid. Maybe it was just a one-night stand. Maybe she should go back inside now; let them think it was just some drunken Tufts kids playing ding-dong-ditch. Maybe-

There was the sharp click of a bolt drawing back, and the door swung slowly open.

“Oh, this had better be good, cupcake.”

Laura’s jaw dropped open, and for a second she almost forgot how to shiver. There, dark hair mussed and gleaming with a faint gold in the hall light, stood Carmilla. Carmilla wearing an oversized band t-shirt, a frown, and not much else. Her legs, ivory washed with warm tonese by the incandescent bulb, seemed longer than ever beneath the hem of the black shirt that reached about halfway to her knees.

“Sooner would be better than later,” Carmilla said. “Before we both freeze to death.”

With a jolt, Laura realized she’d been staring at her infuriating work proximity associate’s bare legs. She felt her cheeks grow warm and firmly decided to blame it on the wind.  
“Could-“ Her voice was a squeak. She cleared her throat and tried again, managing a stronger and steadier tone. “Could you two maybe keep it down? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

Carmilla drummed her fingers against the wood of the door frame. “So this is a noise complaint? Wow. I didn’t realize I was attending Hollis University. Are you going to call the RA on me?”

Laura’s eyes narrowed. “I’d be within my rights to call the cops on you. It’s 2 AM.”

To her mounting frustration, Carmilla laughed. That maddening little chuckle that somehow managed to get under Laura’s skin even more every time she heard it. “Relax, buttercup,” she said, rubbing at her already smudged eyeliner with one knuckle. “My…friend has already passed out. I think we’re about done for the night.”

“Okay, TMI,” Laura huffed, earning a raised eyebrow from Carmilla.

“You know exactly what we were up to, since you came down to complain.” Carmilla shrugged. “It’s not my fault you can’t be an adult about it.”

Laura’s eyes widened. “I’m not being an adult?” she spluttered. “You’re the one refusing to take perfectly legitimate criticism-”

“Are you scoring my technique, or what?”

“Perfectly legitimate _complaints_ , then, from your neighbor. Who has as much right to peace and quiet as you have to sex,” Laura finished, pointedly ignoring Carmilla’s glib interruption.

With a slow, lazy yawn, Carmilla slumped against the doorframe. Laura did not notice the way her t-shirt rode up on one side, exposing even more leg. She definitely did not. Her eyes remained firmly on Carmilla’s face, and whatever her peripheral vision may or may not have picked up was 100% involuntary.

“Wow.” 

“wow? You woke me up with sex noises and all you can say is wow?” Laura crossed her arms.

“What else do you want, buttercup? Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa? I already told you, we’re about to go to sleep.” The playfulness was starting to seep out of her voice, leaving more and more exhaustion by the minute.

The breeze chose that moment to pick up, sneaking icy fingers under every tiny gap between Laura’s hoodie and her thin flannel pajamas. She rubbed her shoulders almost unconsciously, noting with some satisfaction an answering shiver that raised goosebumps on Carmilla’s bare arms.

“Fine,” she said at last. “Thanks for listening, I guess.”

Carmilla opened her mouth, closed it, and looked pensive for a moment. “No problem. I…sorry if I was too brusque or whatever.”

“Very generous,” Laura replied drily. “Keep that touching kindness up and you might just win a Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Ha ha.” The usual languid, disaffected tone had returned to Carmilla’s voice.

Laura tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “So am I going to see you skulking around here often?” 

“Afraid so,” Carmilla said. “Since-”

“Since your girlfriend lives here and all.

Carmilla blinked. Surprise flickered across her face, only to vanish as quickly ahs it came. “Yep,” she said, sounding almost bored. “My girlfriend.”

“Well, I hope you two can keep the frenzied lovemaking to a minimum after 11,” Laura said with a small smile. To her credit, it was at least half genuine.”

Carmilla groaned. “Do me a favor, sunshine, and never say ‘lovemaking’ again in my presence. Or at all.” Her hand found the doorknob again. “And now that we’re both closer to frostbite than I care to contemplate, are we done here?”

Always a genius with comedic timing, the wind chose that moment to howl over the porch again. Between chattering teeth, Laura managed to get out, “Yeah, for sure.”  
The door began to swing shut- and then stopped. Carmilla glanced up from under her bangs, her eyes meeting Laura’s briefly.

“Night, cupcake.”

“Night, Carm,” Laura replied absently. Somewhere in the depths of her pocket lay that damn keyring. If she could just get her hands on the rubbery miniature Pokeball… Her fingers fumbled around the fleece-lined pouch. As they brushed hard plastic instead of soft synthetic fabric, she let out a little cheer under her breath.

It almost masked the quiet sound of the door clicking shut.


	7. Questions and Answers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Has it been forever? Yes. Do I have a valid excuse? Not really. Do I come bearing a peace offering in the form of a chapter? Also yes.

Carmilla’s girlfriend was a ghost.

Or a faerie, or the victim of a freak invisibility accident. As weeks passed with no sign of her, Laura became increasingly convinced of supernatural shenanigans afoot. What else could explain a downstairs neighbor she never actually saw?

(“A really crazy work schedule,” “a really crazy party schedule,” and “agoraphobia” were all suggestions she’d dismissed out of hand, as LaF shot her increasingly skeptical looks over a graduated cylinder of something purple and bubbling.)

She heard plenty of highly adult vocalizations from the apartment below, impressively loud and varied and all- she noted with satisfaction –ending at or before 11 PM. But no-one ever came down to the basement balancing a laundry basket on their hip while she was swearing at her own Craigslist dinosaur of a dryer. No-one but her ever paused to admire the frost patterns in the tiny front yard on their way up the steps. No-one actually grilled on the little red barbecue on the back patio. If it wasn’t for mail appearing and then disappearing from the flimsy metal box next to the other door, she might have suspected Carmilla was dating a squatter.

“Not even a car,” she grumbled to herself, punctuating her words with a particularly emphatic shove of the vacuum cleaner. A glance out the bay window confirmed the total absence of cars on the small strip of concrete next to the building. “Who gets an apartment with off-street parking and doesn’t ever put a car in it?”

Only the faint hiss of the radiator answered. Laura frowned at it.

The radiator. Last week, a sweaty-looking technician had knocked at the back door and said “the lady downstairs” had complained about hers and did Laura mind if he came in and took a look at the other units? So clearly someone had seen the mysterious tenant of Apartment B. And if one person had…

The instant she glanced out the front window, a thought sprang fully formed into her mind. The vacuum handle slipped from her fingers and dropped to the floor with a crash. She raced into her room, skidding a little on the floorboards, and emerged a few seconds later with one arm fully in a heavy wool coat and one foot half out of its sock. She wrestled both coat and socks completely  as she clattered down the stairs.

Only to clatter back up them and prop the vacuum handle gently against the couch.

Stabbing at buttons on her phone, she held it between her shoulder and cheek as she forced her boots on without unlacing them. The stiff, tightly-laced shoes shoved her jeans halfway up her calves, but she barely noticed.

Finally, a voice broke the dial tone. “Elizabeth Spielsdorf speaking.”

“Hey, Betty?” Laura said, panting slightly as her left foot at last slipped into position. “I’m coming over.”

\------------

“So you’ve never met her?”

“That’s what I said,” Betty called from the kitchen. A black cat rubbed against Laura’s legs, arching his back; she reached down absently to scratch his ears. He ignored her with that particular brand of feline indifference that signaled near-adoration. She heaved a sigh and slumped in her chair.

A tall, tired-looking woman appeared in the doorway, a steaming mug in each hand. Her platinum blonde hair was pulled into a messy bun and she seemed to be wearing camouflage scrubs as pajamas. She padded over to the table and sat down, sliding one mug over to Laura.

Laura cupped it in both hands and took a small, hesitant sip. Some of the tension went out of her shoulders. “Mm. Chamomile is the best.”

Betty raised her mug in a mock toast. “Here’s to instant tea bags, cure for all troubles.” She sipped her own tea and glanced at Laura over the mug. “Though I don’t really get this particular trouble, I have to say.”

“Easy for you to say,” Laura replied. “You’ve met your upstairs neighbor, right?”

“Sure. Older lady, half-deaf corgi, makes the best anise cookies ever.” Betty shrugged. “Apart from thanking me for my service every time we meet, she’s pretty harmless. But I’ve lived here way longer than you .”

“Okay, but you’d met her once by the end of the first three months, right?” Laura raked a hand through her hair. “God, my neighbor could be anybody! She could be a serial killer or a sex offender or-”

“Secretly your boss?” The barely-restrained laughter was evident in Betty’s tone, and (Laura reflected) she did not appreciate it.

“Hah,” she snorted. “I think Ms. Belmonde would die before she’d set foot outside of Beacon Hill for any reason besides work.” A deep draught of tea scalded her throat slightly as it went down, uncomfortable but nothing like the cider incident of October. Which brought another relevant point to mind.

“She’s dating Carmilla,” Laura said.

Betty blinked. “Starbucks Girl?”

“Don’t call her that.” Laura wrinkled her nose. “She’s not a Girl, not like Groceries Girl or Red Line Girl or Weird Doll Girl. Not a Girl, capital G. Obnoxious jerks don’t get titles in my life.”

“Chill, Laura,” Betty said with a small chuckle. “You just talk about her a lot, so I figured…” She trailed off suggestively and swallowed another mouthful of tea.

“Nope. No way. Nothing at all going on with Carmilla ‘Raging Bad Person’ Karnstein,” Laura replied emphatically. “She’s dating my downstairs neighbor, anyway. You know, the one I haven’t ever seen? The whole reason I came over here in the first place?”

“I’ve seen her.”

Laura choked on a sip of tea and had to spit it back into her mug, coughing. “What? You said you hadn’t!”

“I said I hadn’t _met_ her,” Betty corrected. She crossed her legs and leaned back against the armchair cushions. “Semantics.”

“You’ve really seen her?”

“Plenty of times.”

Laura regarded her neighbor cautiously. Betty’s expression was a damn sight smugger than she would have liked, but reasonably honest. At least to her eyes. “What’s she like, then?”

Betty shrugged. “Pretty normal-looking. Quiet. Brown hair. Wears a lot of black. Oh, and smoking hot,” she added as an afterthought, “but not as hot as that tall drink of water you turned down back in the fall. Because you’re insane.”

Quiet. A lot of black. Laura nodded slowly. “Definitely sounds like Carmilla’s type,” she said. The crack about Danny was something to explore further, but not now. Now was for surveillance. Playing matchmaker would just have to wait. “Have you ever seen Carmilla with her?”

“I’ve never seen anyone with her,” said Betty. “Sorry, Laur. You know I work the night shift. Anybody she has sleeping over is a mystery to me.”

That hardly mattered. Laura already had ample proof of Carmilla’s presence; it was Miss Apartment B who remained a mystery. She waved Betty’s words away with her free hand. “No worries. Carmilla’s the one person downstairs that I _am_ sure of. It’s just the screamer I don’t know.”

Now it was Betty’s turn to almost spit-take. “The screamer? Oh, girl, you have been holding out on me!”

A beam of weak sunlight shifted through the blinds, and with it, Laura’s thoughts turned from her pet mystery to the familiar ground of neighbor horror stories. Betty had proved a good audience before, laughing or gasping or cursing at all the right moments, and it wasn’t long before Laura found herself caught up in a much lighter and more casual conversation. Her neighbor wasn’t a murderer or a secret pyromaniac. That was enough to know. She was normal.

Except for her terrible taste in women.

\--------------------------

“…that has helped make Jamaica Plain the vibrant community it is today.”

Laura punched the Save icon and fell back against the rough polyester cushion of her desk chair. Despite red, itchy eyes and hair tousled from running her hands through it all day, she couldn’t help smiling. The article was perfect. Even she had to admit it. Days of running around chasing interviews about the new museum, combing archives for quotes about the neighborhood it commemorated, skipping lunch when a new lead turned up on relevant information; weeks of work had all come down to this. And sure, it wasn’t the same as catching the CEO of a mega-corporation with his hand in the company cookie jar, but still. Recording the stories nobody had been telling for decades- that had to count for something, right?

She curled and uncurled her toes inside her shoes and took a long sip from the white Styrofoam cup on her desk. The bitter, artificial taste, still strong beneath a healthy amount of sugar, made her grimace. Preferring Starbucks to Dunkin had to be some kind of sin for a New Englander, but in her mind there was no contest. Without time to stop for a fix on her commute, though, the only remaining option was the “Dunkies” (as LaF called it) on the corner.

The shop downstairs, of course, was out of the question.

Still, she reflected as an email carried the article text off to her editor with a tinny whoosh sound, not much could dampen the high of an assignment checked off one’s to-do list. As she stood and began to stretch, a familiar head poked over the wall of the cubicle.

“Hey, Perr.” The words came out a bit strained around the effort of reaching her arms as high as they could go. Which, an unkind observer might have pointed out, wasn’t very high at all.

“Hello, Laura,” Perry chirped with a smile. “Did you finish that community museum article? I know Ms. Belmonde’s been a bit…insistent about it.”

Laura snorted. “Yeah, insistent. That’s a great way to say ‘Your job is on the line if that little puff piece isn’t in my inbox tonight, Ms. Hollis. And your life if it’s not complete by tomorrow’.” She dropped her arms and silken imitation of her superior’s voice at the same time. “But I have conquered the beast! Laura Hollis will live to fight another day.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Perry. “And in celebration…” She ducked back behind the wall, only to pop up seconds later and thrust a piece of cream cardboard under Laura’s nose.

 _Winter Wonderland!_ The card proclaimed in glittery silver letters. Tiny snowflakes of what appeared to be faux pearl beads surrounded the text, trailing dashes of silver paint pen as if they had just fallen from the sky.

“Join us at Fresh Pond for skating, cocoa, and fun,” Laura read aloud. “Saturday, January 28th at…Perry, this is a lot of effort just to ask if I want to come skating with you.”

Perry rolled her eyes. “Oh, nonsense. Just because no-one bothers to send invitations anymore doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.”

Laura opened her mouth to mention that Perry had, in fact, handed the invitation to her, but thought better of it. No point arguing with a good thing, after all. “I’d love to come; thanks!”

“Wonderful!” Perry clapped her hands- then seemed to remember where she was and glanced around quickly. “Wonderful,” she repeated in a whisper.

“Lucky I remembered to bring my skates from Dad’s after Christmas,” Laura said thoughtfully. “Should I bring anything else along? Like mini-marshmallows?”

“I think we’ll have enough of mini-marshmallows, unless you want to keep eating enough sugar to melt steel.” Perry shot her a disapproving glance.

“One can never have enough mini-marshmallows,” came the sage reply.

Perry threw up her hands. “You’re completely hopeless.”

“I know,” chirped Laura with a grin.

“Oh, speaking of hopeless…”

Laura tensed. She knew that too-casual tone in Perry’s voice very well. It was not a friendly tone. It was not a tone that heralded anything like good news. It was a tone, generally to be avoided.

“What?”

“Well, LaFontaine decided to make some…ah…last-minute additions to the guest list.” Perry twisted her fingers, a nervous habit that dated back at least to their college days and probably earlier.

“What is it, Perr?” Laura asked. “It can’t be that bad. Did they befriend and invite a biker gang or something?”

“They invited Carmilla.”

Laura pinched the bridge of her nose. “I think I’d have preferred the biker gang.”

“You don’t have to come,” Perry said quickly. “Or we can text her and take it back. Tell her someone came down with a cold or- malaria or something and the whole thing was cancelled. That could work.”

“Malaria?” Laura said with a dubious glance in her direction. “In Massachusetts? In the _winter_?” She propped her elbows on the cube wall and leaned her head on her hands. “It’s fine. Really. I’ll just be civil and stay out of her way. She’ll probably be too busy setting a boat house on fire to notice me or something.”

The smile slowly began to creep back onto Perry’s face. “So you’ll still come?”

“Of course!” Laura said with renewed cheerfulness. “Hey, maybe Carmilla won’t even come. She’s not exactly the social butterfly type.”

“We can only hope.” Perry’s expression practically radiated relief, and Laura began to relax a bit herself. It was true; she couldn’t imagine Carmilla on skates. As she sat back down and opened a somewhat less pressing article-in-progress, she had to stifle a giggle at the mental image of the black-clad, badass barista wobbling around like a drunken toddler. Even if she did show up, it might be worth it just for the ensuing sweet, indirect revenge via embarrassment. The daydream grew to epic proportions, filling her mind until she wouldn’t have noticed an elephant marching band going past the building.

Or a short, skinny young man with dark hair and a too-perfect Oxford shirt slipping into her cubicle.

 “Boss wants to know if you’ve finished that article yet.”

Three things happened at the same time. Laura let out the highest-pitched yelp she’d ever produced. She jumped about a foot in her chair. And her right arm collided with her cup mid-flail. Coffee, thankfully now lukewarm, cascaded over papers, desk, and Laura alike. To add insult to injury, the falling cup managed to knock a tantalizing chocolate croissant off her desk to its crumbly demise on the floor.

Theo Straka, social media expert and darling of the Cambridge skate parks, leaned against the back wall of the cubicle and regarded her smugly. “Not your proudest moment, Hollis.”

“Shut up, Theo.” Laura sat back on her heels, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. She tossed the coffee-stained manila folder onto the jumbled, sticky pile. “Yes, I just sent the museum piece. If you’re not going to help me clean this up, go back to chasing the interns or failing to suck up to Ms. Belmonde or whatever it is you do all day.”

Theo smirked. Without even looking up, she could hear it. It was the kind of smirk that made itself audible in a faint tone of unmistakable superiority. “Temper, temper,” he said lazily. One Italian leather loafer propped itself idly against her desk drawer in a way that was sure to leave scuffs. “You know, nobody likes an unprofessional woman in the workplace.”

“Because I’m definitely going to take lessons on work-appropriate behavior from you,” she shot back.

A low whistle. “Maybe you should rethink that.”

“Give me one good reason.”

Judging by the creaking of metal as that infuriating fancy shoe scraped in a different direction against the flimsy metal drawer, Theo was stretching. “You don’t want to end up like the last girl who sat here,” he said in an almost too-casual tone. “Got canned and then some. Not that she didn’t deserve it.”

Laura bit the inside of her cheek, focusing on the iron taste of blood to keep herself quiet. There was no point rising to the bait; men like Theo Straka lived for that kind of thing. God help the world if he was ever introduced to the comment section of YouTube. Instead, she grabbed a loose sheet of paper and began sweeping up the fallen remains of her croissant.

“…promising future,” she heard him saying when she tuned back in, trying to shake coffee out of her shoes over the trash can. “Once she learned to control that temper, she was headed straight for the top. If only she’d been able to keep it in her pants, eh, Hollis?”

Laura closed her eyes tightly, an irritated sigh hissing out between her teeth. “Theo,” she said at last, “I do not care about any of this. I don’t even know who you’re talking about. So could you please just let me put my desk and my dignity back together in peace?”

“You don’t know?” Standing now, she had the dubious privilege of seeing the smirk on his chiseled face instead of just hearing it. His dark eyes twinkled in a way that anyone who’d never spoken to him would probably find charming. “I’m sorry; I just can’t believe nobody ever told you. It was all anyone talked about for weeks.”

“No, no-one has told me, and I don’t really care.” Banging her head against a brick wall was starting to look better than trying to get Theo to leave. Or at least less futile.

“Oh, it was the worst,” he said with a gleeful smile. “So this girl, right? Wicked smart; graduated top of her class from Oxford or Cambridge or wherever. Spoke English, French, _and_ German, and she could charm the pants off anybody. She got interviews from people I’d thought were no-gos for sure.”

“But she had a temper and she was, like, totally boy-crazy and slept with the boss’ nephew and got the sack.” Laura’s voice was deadpan. She leaned against the low cubicle wall and crossed her arms. “Is this going to take much longer?”

Theo shook his head, grinning even wider. “Nah, that’s the wild part. _Girl_ -crazy. Just like you. Must be a requirement for this job, huh? Anyway, she banged the boss’ daughter and got her ass handed to her personally. Whole floor heard the shouting. It was…” he trailed off. “Intense. Mrs. Morgan swore she’d never work as a journalist again, in this town or anywhere else. As far as I know, she hasn’t.”

Laura raised an eyebrow. “Uh huh.”

“Honest truth, Hollis.”

“No, I believe you,” she said. Something squished unpleasantly in her shoe; she shifted her weight, trying to find a dry spot to rest her foot. “But what does that have to do with me? Trust me, I have no plans to go after Ms. Belmonde.”

“Not Mattie,” he said calmly, examining his nails. “The other one.”

A tiny wrinkle appeared between Laura’s brows. “…other one? Mrs. Morgan only has one daughter.”

Theo rolled his eyes. “The one that doesn’t work here anymore. The grumpy younger one. God, you really don’t know anything, do you?”

“The grumpy younger one?” Her skirt seemed to be doing an experiment on the adhesive properties of heavily sugared coffee on polyester and legs.

“Yeah. Wow. You’ll just have to take my word for it.” He started for the doorway, and a choir of angels in Laura’s mind began singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Then, to that tiny choir’s dismay, he paused just beyond the boundaries of the little office.

“Just be careful, kid,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you to end up a cautionary tale like Elle Sheridan.”

And as Theo walked away whistling quietly, things slotted into place in Laura’s mind, pieces fitting together into a picture she didn’t much like the look of.


	8. The Fake Dating AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been forever, but I do have an excuse this time around. Well, a more valid excuse. Some pretty awful typing tics have made getting anything done with a keyboard take aeons, and as such I've been avoiding it. But I finally managed to bang something out.

There were, Laura decided, three types of people at any given skating rink.

First and most ubiquitous, the Sideliners. Whether out of social enjoyment or simply a fear of falling on their asses, these cautious souls remained solidly off the ice. They congregated at the wrought iron tables and chair and chairs on solid, non-slippery ground, most clutching paper cups with the concessions logo blazoned on one side. Among them, she spotted Perry’s wild mop of curls and heard a laugh that, to her surprise, belonged unmistakably to Danny. For all her triathlon bumper stickers, it seemed there were limits to even her athletic prowess.

Into the second group, the Get-Alongs, Laura squarely placed herself. Plenty of them dotted the pale expanse of the ice, trucking around the rink steadily if stolidly. Years of gliding over the bumpy, uneven surface of the creek behind her house had given her the ability to avoid disgracing herself on skates, but not much more. Most of the familiar faces she could spot seemed to fall into the same category, from Kirsch in an overly ambitious Bruins jersey to Mel, who Danny seemed to know from some college archery club. Laura smiled as she spotted her halfway through a lap, pulling a wobbly-legged Charlotte behind her.

The smile vanished as a representative of the final, smallest group rounded the nearest curve of the artificial pond. Of all the Olympians nature could have provided, one of the group’s resident examples had to be Carmilla.

While LaF drew gasps from the crowd near the center of the ice with dramatic leaps and turns, Laura’s sort-of-nemesis circled the little gaggle of onlookers like a blade. There was nothing showy to her movements, merely the perfect precision and confident speed born of more hours on the ice than Laura cared to contemplate. At times, she almost seemed to lapse into slow motion, skimming the ice in near stillness before bending slightly forward and kicking off to keep up her momentum. Once or twice, out of the corner of her eye, Laura spotted her skating backwards for a few seconds.

It was unfair. Monstrously unfair. Fuming, Laura leaned against the low, white wall around the rink. She dusted errant snow off the knees of her jeans- couldn’t parents keep their kids from bowling people over? –and scowled at the offending black figure.

Why did _she_ have to be good at this? Plenty of people weren’t. Plenty of people couldn’t go two steps in skates without a truly spectacular face-plant. It was precisely that image that had kept Laura humming a little tune to herself as she’d pulled on her fuzziest socks that morning and settled a TARDIS-patterned bobble hat over her elaborate five-strand braid. Carmilla, splayed on the ice in the least dignified fashion possible, finally shown up for all the world to see.

Carmilla finished another perfect lap. No—one seemed to be watching her, but Laura but Laura still bristled at the injustice of it all. The world was a cold, cruel place. That much, she knew without a doubt.

Well, literally cold at the moment. With a small shiver, she eyed Danny’s steaming cup longingly. It was definitely cider, but she could just taste mini marshmallows melting in rich cocoa. Her mouth began to water as she glided towards the edge of the rink. Let stupid, pretentious, snarky Elvira wannabes have their fun. Today was for her real friends, And by golly, she was going to focus on them.

Only when a cry of “Look out!” pierced the air did she realize that focusing on where she was going might also have been wise.

A dark and mercifully small tangle of limbs collided with her, coming almost out of nowhere from the right and sending them both to the ice. Hard. Laura’s knees instinctively shifted to one side, bent to minimize the impact to her body. She only hoped the other party had been able to do the same. Speaking of that other party…

She glanced at the young woman now shaking out her hand with a wince, and groaned as her worst fears were confirmed. It was Carmilla. Of course it was Carmilla. An entire fifty or so people on the ice, but somehow she had been sure before even looking that her mystery woman would be Carmilla.

The offending barista sat up, wincing again as she put weight on the aforementioned hand to lever herself up. She shot Laura a half-smile. “We have to stop meeting like this, cupcake.”

I-” Laura began, but let the sentence die as a tall, out-of-breath man skidded to a halt beside them. Right beside them. More over them than anything else, looming against the sky like a particularly aerodynamic beanpole.

He leaned over, panting, with his hands on his designer leggings. “Car…milla? You…okay?”

Laura expected a snarl. A glare. A middle finger raised in his face and a hearty “Get lost.” SO when Carmilla plastered a beaming, patently fake smile on her face and cocked her head to one side, Laura’s mouth dropped open so wide she felt sure her chin would hit the ice.

“I’m fine, Karl; thanks,” she chirped. (Chirped? Since when did Carmilla chirp?) “No harm done.”

“Here.” The mysterious Karl extended a hand. “Let me help you. Have you on your feet in no time!”

“Oh, no, really, I’m-”

“And then you can let me buy you that hot chocolate,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. Suddenly, Laura’s brain managed to string his words together and slot them into place. Coupled with the fact that he hadn’t once taken his eyes off Carmilla, it painted an all-too-clear picture.

Then, almost as an outside observer, Laura realized she’d scrambled to her feet. She held out one blue-striped glove to Carmilla. And she heard her own voice say, “Come on, sweetie; I got you.”

One of these days, mused the tiny fraction of her mind that wasn’t screaming, she’d learn to think before she opened her mouth. Karl’s wide-eyed glance between the two women was matched only by Carmilla’s incredulous stare. Laura could almost hear that smoky voice in her head: _have you got brain damage after all, cutie?_

She raised her eyebrows in what she hoped Carmilla caught as a significant look. “Carm? Cider on me. You deserve it after all that.”

Carmilla hesitated- then took her hand. Laura’s shoulders relaxed as she pulled herself up, managing to lean on her without dragging them both back down. She slung an arm around Laura’s shoulders and turned back to the hapless Karl.

“”Karl, this is Laura Hollis,” she said. Laura could just make out the edge beneath the sweetness of her tone, but her grin remained innocent. “My girlfriend.”

No thunder crashed from the heavens. The pale gray clouds didn’t begin to snow frozen blood, and Death didn’t skate past on a highly-trained white horse. The least likely statement of the century imply hung in the air, like the warm weight of the arm around Laura. Somehow, it didn’t sound as horrifying as she would have expected.

At least, not to her. Karl’s face fell as if Carmilla had just admitted to a place on the Women’s All-Star Puppy Kicking Team. “So you were serious,” he said. Carmilla nodded. “I generally am.”

“Fine,” Karl sighed. “I’ll just  resign myself to the biggest waste of the century. Double the waste,” he added with a glance at Laura. “You’re both lovely ladies. Just my luck, huh?”

His crooked attempt at a smile seemed to mark this speech as a joke, but it hung in the frosty air without so much a word of response. If looks could kill, Carmilla’s expression would have been banned in more progressive countries. Laura forced a grin and grabbed the hand draped over her shoulder tightly.

“Yeah, well. It sure is a shame when not absolutely everything and everyone in the world is of use to you,” she said in her perkiest tone. Before Karl could work out the substance of the statement, she slipped out from under Carmilla’s arm and  began towing her towards the edge of the rink by their still-clasped hands. When they were far enough away for their voices to be obscured by the hiss of skates against ice, she turned back to Carmilla.

“What was that?”

“What?” Carmilla asked evenly.

“That!” Laura flung up her mittened hands. “You’re some badass tough girl, but you can’t tell one creep to get lost?”

“He’s my manager’s son.” Disdain practically dripped from Carmilla’s words. “And the apple of her eye. I tell him off, I can kiss my job good-bye.

A tiny line appeared between Laura’s eyebrows. “Why are you so desperate to keep it?”

“Girl’s gotta pay her bills, sugarbomb,” Carmilla said, flexing her injured hand experimentally. She pushed off the ice once more, leaving Laura to scramble for a moment while she tried to catch up. At last, the smaller woman drew level with her again.

“But why Starbucks?”

“How do you know I’m qualified for anything else?”

“Because…” Laura trailed off. _Because dating you was a big enough conflict of interest to destroy your ex’s journalism career,_ she didn’t say. Couldn’t say.”…you seem smarter than that,” she finished lamely.

Carmilla snorted. “We’re Millennials. You know as well as I that intelligence doesn’t always guarantee a gig to match.”

At a loss for words she could safely say, Laura just nodded.

“Anyway, thanks for covering for me.”

“I couldn’t just leave a Sapphic sister in distress.” Laura blinked. “Although, what exactly did Mr. Manly McHomophobe mean by ‘you were serious’?”

With a groan, Carmilla stopped drifting and began shoving one foot and then then other against the ice to speedup. After a few stumbling steps, Laura caught her rhythm and began keeping pace instead of being tugged by their still-joined hands.

“I told him I had a girlfriend,” Carmilla said. “I didn’t say it was you, before you jump down my throat. You brought this on yourself.”

“And you may have gotten in over your head,” she added after a quick glance over their shoulders, “because she seems to be following us.”

One day. Just one day of peaceful skating with her friends. Was that really too much for Laura to  ask for? She  looked over at Danny, now being pulled onto the ice by an earnest-looking Perry as LaF stood on the sidelines, phone raised in one hand. Judging by Danny’s futile but aggressive flailing in their direction, they were acquiring video blackmail fodder. A curl of steam rose from the white paper cup in their other hand, and a ghost of hot sweetness seemed to bloom in her mouth for the second time that day.

Carmilla wasn’t her responsibility. She wasn’t even her friend. And for a moment, her fingers loosened around Carmilla’s. But then she noticed her expression.

Worried. With anxious lines etched into the corners of her eyes as she kept stealing glances back at Karl. For the second time in their acquaintance, she looked- vulnerable.

A moment later, Laura squeezed her hand.

“The we’ll just have to make sure he gets the message, won’t we, sweetie?”

Carmilla looked at her sharply. “What message?”

“That you’re mine.” With that, Laura slipped her arm through Carmilla’s pulling them closer together, and pushed off from the  ice with renewed vigor

\------------

The strange, frustrating, baffling thing about Carmilla was how pleasant she could be.

Sure, it was a snarky kind of pleasant, dry as a James Bond martini. Laura’s choice of nicknames, for instance, proved a source of endless amusement.

“Sweetie?” Carmilla had said as they glided smoothly around a curve. “Really/”

“It’s a perfectly valid term of endearment,” Laura replied. The gravitas of her argument was somewhat spoiled as a teenager on hockey skates sliced close enough to make her yelp and sped away laughing.

Carmilla rolled her eyes. “For you, maybe.”

“So what would you prefer?” came the retort.

She cocked her head, dark brown waves falling over one shoulder like a curtain. Finally, she replied, “Not my job.”

“What?”

“You’re my girlfriend, my pet name is your purview. Buttercup.” –this punctuated with a mock-innocent look in Laura’s direction.

The trouble with big, shining brown eyes was that they could make you momentarily forget who owned them. Laura stammered for a second, then regained her composure. “Princess,” she said firmly.

“Because of my royal bearing?” Carmilla murmured, and Laura saw briefly just why Miss Screamer stayed with her.

“Because you’re incredibly self-centered.”

“Ah.” Carmilla grinned at her sidelong. “Give me countess at least. There’s something inherently gay about a countess.”

“And inherently vampire-y.”

Those perfectly arched eyebrows rose. “How do you know that’s not what I’m going for?”

Laura chuckled in spite of herself. “I’m sure it is.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls, cupcake.” Carmilla rolled her eyes, but her smile looked unusually genuine.

“Just the broody, obnoxious ones with really vocal girlfriends,” Laura laughed.

Carmilla’s face- closed. There was no better way to describe it; Laura had always thought the phrase a bit overly poetic, but it was as if a wall had snapped down behind her eyes. She looked out across the rink, watching the skaters without seeming to see them.

“Um. Carm?” Laura ventured. “Everything okay? I haven’t been, like, listening in or anything. I promise. It’s just kind of hard to miss when you’re over at her place so often-”

“You should get back to your friends.” Carmilla’s voice cut across her babbling. “The sooner we get off the ice, the sooner Karl the Boor might take the hint and leave.”

Laura’s stomach dropped, though she couldn’t have said why. “Right. Okay. Yeah. Let’s- let’s get off the ice.” Without further preamble, she let go of Carmilla’s hand and headed for the side of the rink. A few more pushes got her back to top speed, and she definitely wasn’t listening as another pair of skates zinged against the ice behind her. The edge drew closer and closer- she could make out Perry’s hair, held back by a fleece ear wrap. Soon enough, this whole weird episode would be over.

Too late, though, she remembered the low wall that surrounded the ice. She turned her toes inwards and felt herself slow, but it wasn’t enough. She was going to crash.

For the second time that day.

Almost instinctively, she bent her knees and braced for impact. Her eyes narrowed in an involuntary cringe-

-only to widen in surprise when one hand caught hers and another pressed gently but firmly on the small of her back. The wall shot past her right side as she turned towards the pressure.

“Can’t have you wiping out twice in one day, can we?” Laura looked up to see Carmilla smiling down- well, a bit down and mostly across –at her. She had to hand it to the other woman: Carmilla was a great actress. Even Laura, who knew otherwise, could almost believe the warmth in her eyes was genuine. Karl must have been near, hiding somewhere out of plain sight but still close by.

Slowly she maneuvered the turn into a full half-circle, coming to a halt face-to-face with Carmilla.

“I can kind of see how you keep that girlfriend,” she said with one raised eyebrow. “Kind of.”

Carmilla’s hand dropped from her wiast, chill air rushing in to replace the warmth of the contact. “Laura-”

Laura!”

Her braid smacked her face as her head whipped around. Standing just beyond the wall, LaF motioned frantically at her. A few lazy strides, and she bumped gently to a halt against the dingy white vinyl.

“What’s up?” She carefully didn’t react to the quiet sound of another body bouncing against the wall beside her.

“I’ve been trying to flag you down for 20 minutes,” they huffed. “Mel and Charlotte want to go to that Korean bakery over by Central, and the rest of the locals are getting restless.”

“Right. Sorry!” Laura scooted to the nearest gate and stepped carefully over the threshold. LaF pulled her close in what seemed at first to be an out-of-character hug.

“Warming up to Carmilla finally?” they hissed in her ear.

She shoved them away and clomped towards the nearest bench. “Ugh. It’s- just don’t ask, okay?”

How could something that made one so graceful on ice turn into the evil cousin of ankle weights on land? She tugged at the knots in her laces to no avail. With a growl of frustration, she stomped the offending skate against the concrete.

“Don’t know what that’s supposed to do, sugar plum,” came an all too familiar voice from beside her. ‘Unless it’s an advanced skate removal technique as yet unknown to us mere mortals.”

Of course Carmilla had followed her. Of course this was happening, and she couldn’t get her stupid skate off like an idiot and some higher power just had to get kicks from making her squirm. In the immortal words of John Mulaney, this might as well happen.

She blew an errant strand of hair out of her face and grumbled, “So now you’re stalking me on top of everything?”

“I’m part of this party,” Carmilla replied breezily. “Ginger von Frankenstein invited me, remember? Where the motely set goes, I go.”

“Why are you so determined to weasel your way into this friend group?”

“Why are you so adamant that I haven’t been here from the start?”

A pair of rented skates clunked into Laura’s peripheral vision, pointed squarely in her direction. Her gaze traveled up, over very familiar UNIQLO leggings and an olive cashmere pullover, and her sharp retort died half-formed.

“Trouble in paradise?” asked Karl.

Carmilla stiffened, closed her eyes. Laura knew the famous “count to ten” technique, but she’d never been able to actually see the numbers wordlessly mouthed by someone before.

“Finally, Carmilla said, “Nope. We’re fine, but thanks for asking.” Once again, Laura felt someone ought to page the Oscar committee. Or an anger management clinic looking for a new success story for their testimonials page.

“Really?” Karl said with a smile. He inclined his head toward Carmilla and planted his hands on his hips. “Because it seems like things between you and your so-called girlfriend are pretty tense.

Laura felt a hand close around hers after a moment of fumbling. “You know relationships; nobody’s perfect.” Even to her ears, it didn’t sound convincing.

Evidently Karl agreed. He shook his head at the two women, crossed his arms, smiled even wider, and seemed about two steps away from shaking his finger.

“I’d hate to think you weren’t a team player, Carmilla,” he said in a tone that missed rueful by a mile and landed squarely in smug. “You know how Mom feels about group cooperation.”

“You clearly don’t know Carm very well. Team player is her middle name.” It was a stretch and Laura knew it. Judging by the amused look that crept across Karl’s face, so did he.

“Well if she can’t even manage her own ‘relationships’…” The air quotes were audible. Carmilla’s fingers tightened around Laura’s hand.

“Laura!” Perry’s voice echoed loud and shrill from the edge of the parking lot. “Carmilla! Come on!” Freedom was ten feet away- if they could salvage this. The spark of an idea flared in Laura’s brain. It was a stupid idea. Possibly the stupidest she’d ever thought of, and in twenty-four years, there had been some serious doozies.

She caught Carmilla’s eye, then glanced deliberately at her lips for a second. After a moment, she got a tiny nod in response. Her stomach did a flip.

_It’s to save her job. WLW solidarity. Woman up, Hollis._

And there, in front of her friends, a few work acquaintances, and what looked like two separate Cambridge youth hockey teams, Laura leaned over and kissed Carmilla Karnstein.


End file.
